


kurt interlude: blaine's birthday

by nightbirdrises



Series: Sinking 'verse [13]
Category: Glee
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-28
Updated: 2014-09-28
Packaged: 2018-02-19 01:41:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2369759
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nightbirdrises/pseuds/nightbirdrises
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Hint: it makes things sink."</p>
            </blockquote>





	kurt interlude: blaine's birthday

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings for this segment: none
> 
> You can read Sinking in chronological order using [this page](http://princehummel.tumblr.com/sinking), or you can read it in the order of events as I wrote them [here](http://princehummel.tumblr.com/tagged/v%3A+sinking/chrono).

**From: Q**  
You’re a little shit.

  
**To: Q**  
Hello to you too.

  
**From: Q**  
Where are you? I hate smoking by myself even if you won’t smoke with me anymore

  
**From: Q**  
wait, let me guess: you’re at Loverboy’s place

  
**To: Q**  
It’s his birthday tomorrow.

  
**From: Q**  
Well in THAT case I’ll break out a new pack just for him.

  
**To: Q**  
How sentimental. See you under the bleachers on Mon?

  
**From: Q**  
yeah, yeah. Have fun.

  
Kurt tossed his phone to the end of the bed and said, “Q wishes you a happy birthday.”

He watched, amused, as Blaine blinked his eyes open to give him a dubious look. The boards were both too far away at this point for either of them to reach, so Kurt patiently waited for Blaine to remember and execute a sign.

**Really?**

**You know her** , he signed back, slow and deliberate in the way he hadn’t needed to since Finn was still learning. Then again, most of the nuances of sign language still managed to escape his stepbrother somehow. It was a minor miracle that they could communicate at all.  **She didn’t say it in so many words.**

**What words, then?**

"Something about opening a new pack just for you," Kurt explained aloud, aware that Blaine wouldn’t understand the appropriate signs. He was learning quickly, though, and Kurt couldn’t help but be a little proud.

 **That’s nice** , Blaine signed, his expression portraying the exact opposite.

Okay, so maybe he was kind of really fucking proud of his boyfriend. He had every right to be. 

They were lying next to each other on Blaine’s bed, naked underneath the covers with their legs tangled and being decidedly lazy. Blaine lay on his back; he started to slip his eyes closed again — while Kurt tended towards giddiness after sex, Blaine simply morphed into a drowsily adorable puppy-slash-pillow.

Kurt snorted to himself when he remembered the day that Blaine had learned how to say “sex” in sign language. He wasn’t sure what he was expecting when Blaine showed up in his room that day over break, but he certainly wasn’t expecting him to sit on the bed and sign  **Let’s have sex**  with a straight, even passive, expression.

The memory invoked an increasingly common sensation of floating, with warmth expanding in his chest.  _Like a hot air balloon_ , he thought wryly.

The mattress shifted and he returned his attention to Blaine, who had turned onto his side and now faced away from Kurt. With a satisfied hum, Kurt edged closer to Blaine, propped himself up on one elbow, and hooked his chin over Blaine’s upper arm. His arm reached down Blaine’s side, fingertips skimming warm skin underneath the earth-toned comforter.

The touch was familiar, and Kurt found himself drifting off in his own dream-conjured hot air balloon — until his index finger found an odd ridge on Blaine’s right hip, a barely-there, thin protrusion that formed a diagonal line pointing towards the inside of Blaine’s leg. Kurt guessed it was about two inches long and wondered how he’d never before noticed what was clearly a scar.

He caught Blaine’s lips moving out of the corner of his eye and his gaze automatically slid to them.

"… something wrong?" was what he managed to understand.

"You have a scar on your hip," Kurt said, fighting off a yawn. "I never noticed."

"Board," Blaine mouthed. Kurt rolled over, grabbing one of the boards from the nightstand and handing it to Blaine. They each turned onto their backs, and Kurt watched Blaine’s hand move as he wrote.

 _It’s from my old school, the one before Dalton_ , Kurt read.

"Sadie Hawkins?" He knew about that, after all, how Blaine had ended up in the hospital when he tried to enjoy a school dance with another boy.

_Nope. It was after I got discharged and went back to school (completely pointless because I had missed so much and the year was about to end, oh well)_

"What happened?"

_Do you really want to know?_

"If you want to tell me."

Blaine nodded and adjusted his position in order to write more easily, shuffling up on the bed so that he was propped up against the headboard. Kurt didn’t watch this time — he stared up at the ceiling, thinking. It was too easy to think when he had no way to distract himself with sounds or music or even the light rustle of sheets.

He didn’t think about anything in particular, but Blaine seemed to feature in every other thought. Kurt wanted to do something special for his birthday, and not just birthday sex, either. They’d already covered that pretty thoroughly today. No, he wanted to give Blaine something that would last for as long as possible, something that would remind him of Kurt in the years to come, however their relationship progresses (or doesn’t). Maybe that was slightly selfish of him, but he couldn’t help but wonder about the future.

 _Fuck_ , he thought.  _How did this turn into something so…_

Important, amazing, heavy — adjectives rolled around in his brain, preventing him from picking just one. This thing with Blaine was no longer an almost-abstract idea just coming to reality; it was tangible and  _there_  and oh-so-fragile. He’d never really imagined being in a serious relationship, at least not as the Kurt Hummel he was now. He’d already resigned himself to that fact when Blaine had wandered, lost, into his life.

So much for that, and good riddance because the past few months had been some of the best of his life.

He jumped, barely, when Blaine nudged him with the board. He twisted slightly to look up at Blaine, who had an eyebrow raised expectantly.

"I was thinking," Kurt mumbled, taking the board. The bed shook gently as Blaine chuckled.

 _It was my first day back_ , he read.  _I was terrified of everyone around me, even some of my own friends. Walking down the hall that afternoon, some guy yelled “fag” and grabbed me by the shoulders. He threw me right into a passing cart with chemistry equipment on it, and some of the flasks shattered. A huge piece of broken glass got stuck in my hip. And voila! Lucky me got a scar as a memoir._

"Oh, Blaine…"

 **No.**  Kurt frowned, staring at Blaine’s hands as they moved.  **No talking about bad things. I’m here, not there, so it’s okay.**

 **It’s not okay** , he signed sharply, then again at Blaine’s lost expression. Blaine shrugged and took back the board, writing quickly.

_Maybe not, but it’s too late to do anything about it now. The important thing is that now I have Puck, and Sam, and someone else… I can’t seem to put my finger on the name… I think it rhymes with ‘shirt’_

"Fuck off," Kurt said, though he smiled. Blaine erased the sentences and started drawing something. Confused, Kurt watched as a game of Hangman took shape on the board, a line of dashes underneath it representing a mystery phrase.

  
___ __ __   __ __ __   __ __   __ __ __ __ __ ___

  
"Blaine?"

 _Guess a letter_ , he wrote in a margin, grinning.

"We could be having sex right now." Blaine shoved him lightly. "Okay, okay. A."

The letter was written in two spaces, and Kurt didn’t have any idea what the words might be.

  
___ __ __   A __ __   __ __   A __ __ __ __ ___

  
Stumped, he continued to guess. No B, one M, definitely no Q. Kurt glared at the board when there weren’t any Ls or Ps (but one U), and he swore he could feel Blaine’s eyes on him, sparking with amusement.

 _It’s not THAT hard_ , he wrote. Kurt didn’t think it was possible to convey things such as teasing through the written word, but apparently he had been wrong.

"I’ll show you what’s hard," he grumbled, refusing his every instinct to groan internally.

_Did you really just…_

"Shut up. O."

Blaine gave the hangman (who now had a head, a body, and two legs) a winking face before his marker returned to the blank spaces below.

  
___ O U   A __ __   M __   A __ __ __ O ___

  
The following Y was simple enough — and in fact, there were two, which filled out the words “you” and “my” and made Kurt way more excited than he wanted to let on. He had a feeling that Blaine noticed his smile, though, and maybe that wasn’t so bad. He liked when Blaine noticed him, all of him.

The letter E came next, of which there was only one. It led him to guess the letter R, however, filling out the word “are” and tacking an ending to the last word, which was still a mystery.

"What the fuck kind of word is this?" he asked no one in particular. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Blaine shrug noncommittally. "Give me a hint."

_Cheater._

"It’s not an exam, is it?"

_Would that really matter to you?_

"I wouldn’t cheat on an important exam, B," he huffed. It was still a little strange to hold such extensive conversation this way and more than a little one-sided for Kurt despite that there was equal contribution, but he enjoyed it nonetheless. The simple fact that Blaine didn’t seem to mind it meant the world to Kurt, who had gotten used to people giving up on talking to him entirely out of impatience and frustration.

_Hint: it makes things sink._

"What?" He turned his head to look at Blaine, who tilted his head to the side, feigning innocence. "That’s it?" Blaine put on an exaggeratedly thoughtful expression before writing another line next to the first hint.

_it also provides support and stability._

"So it’s a thing?" Blaine nodded. "Three different letters?" He nodded again. "Okay. Uh… C?"

One C, surrounded on either side by a blank space. Kurt stared at the word — he had the feeling he should know, but his brain seemed unable to make any connections.

Then it hit him.

He sat up a bit straighter on the bed and whispered the word into Blaine’s ear for no particular reason other than he suddenly felt as though his voice would be too shaky or high-pitched to speak normally. Blaine smiled and finished the phrase, taking the time to erase everything else around it.

  
_Y O U   A R E   M Y   A N C H O R_

 

 ”B, I don’t—”  _I don’t understand, don’t know what to say, don’t know if I can trust myself to say_ anything _because fuck it could be nothing but incoherent noises for all I can tell._

He gave up on saying anything at all in the end and just turned to rest his head on Blaine’s chest, an arm around his waist, bumping the board by accident. Blaine hummed, a soft vibration that echoed through their bare skin and left Kurt feeling… safe.

Sure, he’d learned to let the worst of things roll off his back. He’d been doing that since before the accident. But to have someone that wasn’t family, someone with whom he could converse, could kiss and touch ( _and love_ , a voice whispered, unbidden, in his head) without that cold and sometimes eerily interested judgment he so often received.

Not to mention he didn’t feel that nagging need to smoke anymore and knew that Blaine had so much to do with it, especially since they’d had their fight about the issue (which seemed so long ago, now, had it really only been a month?)

If he was Blaine’s anchor, then Blaine was his shelter. Something necessary, something he couldn’t help but return to despite (and because of) all the worst, something to call home — to call  _his_.

"Hey, B?" A soft rumble against his palm, which had shifted to rest against the base of Blaine’s neck out of reflex and necessity, told him that Blaine was listening. “I…”

He wanted to say it. He wanted to say it so badly, but the next two words caught in his throat and  _shit_  even if he managed to get them out he was sure they would not sound normal.

He really missed the sound of his own voice.

"I, um, I was thinking…" Kurt’s mind searched for a cover-up, something plausible. Blaine, birthday, tomorrow — "Doyoumaybewantatattoo?"

He tilted his chin up to look at Blaine’s expression, which conveyed plain confusion. Kurt took a deep breath and tried again, focusing on the way his lips moved.

"You’ll be eighteen tomorrow, so I thought maybe we could go get you a tattoo from this place I know. Kind of a PG birthday gift from me. Only if you want to—" He stopped, noticing his speech speeding up and knowing that he had to stop before he lost track of his own words.

 **Yes** , Blaine signed without hesitation. Kurt blinked, amazed that he’d diverted attention from his lapse and suddenly excited at tomorrow’s possibilities.

"Good. So, tomorrow." Blaine nodded, grinning. "You’re sure I can stay in here?"

Blaine opened his mouth before apparently deciding against that method of communication; instead he picked the board up from where it lay in his lap and wrote underneath the Hangman phrase,  _It’ll be fine, my parents have warmed up to you a lot in the last month._

"They don’t know I’m here, do they?"

_…_

"They don’t," Kurt said, chuckling in spite of himself.

_Hey now, chances are they’re already asleep, and if they see you in the morning we can cover by saying you walked over here early. No problem :D_

"Dork."

_:( asshole._

"Sap."

_meanie._

"My B," Kurt finished, accidentally-on-purpose knocking the board aside as he shifted angles to better capture Blaine’s lips with his. It worked — Blaine’s hands came up to frame his face and didn’t continue to write those fucking words that somehow burrowed into his heart and stuck there, warm and sweet and nearly unbelievable.

He missed voices. Not just his own, but everyone’s — his dad’s, especially, and the voices of the New Directions that had such potential in his sophomore year. Of course, he never had the chance to know Blaine’s, but Blaine was neat, looping, shining marks on white panels, as well as halting, unsure though quickly improving gestures. He was expressive, whiskey-colored eyes and lips that tasted as fantastic as they moved. He was beautiful language incarnate.

Kurt gasped and took in a quick breath through his nose when Blaine tugged on his lower lip with his teeth, then realized the time.

"Hey, no," he whispered, rolling onto his back and away from Blaine, who pouted. "It’s late, and you’re becoming a big boy tomorrow so you need your sleep."

Blaine stretched for the board.  _Technically I’m already a big boy - it’s 3 AM and I was born just after 2, so ha!_

Kurt rolled his eyes and huffed. “Technically, we have to sleep in order to function properly.”

_Sigh. You’re right, Mr. Responsible. Let’s sleep._

"I don’t even have the energy to kick your ass for calling me Mr. Responsible again," Kurt mumbled as Blaine leaned over him to turn off the lamp. "Goodnight."

The pang of realizing he couldn’t hear a response in Blaine’s voice thankfully got a bit weaker each time, especially as he rubbed a thumb across the scar on his hip in slow strokes until he fell asleep.

 

* * *

 

The next morning, Blaine’s mother made a breakfast of blueberry pancakes and didn’t question Kurt’s presence, though he imagined he could feel her gaze on him every time he turned away. Not judging, necessarily, but calculating and curious. He could understand that; he wasn’t exactly inconspicuous, and prided himself on it.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw Blaine’s mouth move, his body facing his mom where she stood in the kitchen. She nodded and Kurt almost asked Blaine what was going on — but then the mystery was solved when a small bottle of honey found its way to the counter in front of him. Blaine grinned, Kurt laughed out of a mix of embarrassment and gratefulness, and they ate quickly without conversation.

The next thing he knew, Kurt was dragging Blaine to the tattoo parlor on the end of Lima’s main street — it looked sketchy, but he assured his boyfriend that it was a good place. After all, that was where he’d gotten his own tattoo.

When the needle appeared, Blaine suddenly reached for the board and scribbled something down, throwing an apologetic look at the artist who shrugged lazily.

_Can you wait outside? I want it to be a surprise._

Kurt was taken aback but he didn’t protest; he stepped outside and leaned against one of the walls of the building, well aware of how the pose made him appear: intimidating, delinquent. He was a black sheep with pink highlights.

Blaine left the parlor and found him almost immediately, sticking out his tongue.

"Oh, please," Kurt said, knowing exactly what Blaine was thinking. "It’s your birthday. I can pay for one tattoo." A raised eyebrow. "Maybe Dad helped. Are you gonna show me or not?"

Blaine crossed his arms and bit his lip, staring at his feet. Kurt glanced around his body but couldn’t see any bandages — and then he remembered that Blaine couldn’t take the bandages off for at least two hours.

"Later, then," he hummed, getting off the wall to give Blaine a peck on the cheek. It wasn’t as sickeningly embarrassing as he’d expected, and he smiled as he led Blaine by the hand towards his house so that they could celebrate with Burt and Carole.

 

* * *

 

"You’ve had those on for long enough," Kurt whined.

_You think so?_

"Three and a half hours, B."

_Guess I’ll go take off the stuff and wash it in the bathroom then._

"I’m coming with you."

 _I don’t think so_ , Blaine added to the board with a wink before leaving it on Kurt’s bed and stepping out of the room. Kurt started to organize his closet to pass the time — no matter how different he was now, organization and fashion were still important — and didn’t notice Blaine’s return until he felt a gentle (though still startling) pressure on his waist.

"It’s about fucking ti—" he started, turning in Blaine’s arm and realizing that he was shirtless. Blaine took his hand and guided it down to his right hip, settling it against the waistband of his jeans. Kurt quirked an eyebrow and Blaine signed,  **Look.**

He looked, and positioned on top of the old glass scar was a small anchor in black ink, the skin around it shining with ointment.

"Your anchor," Kurt breathed without thinking, and Blaine nodded. Kurt couldn’t do anything else except tighten his grip on Blaine’s jeans and kiss him, hard and sure, backing him up to a wall with probably a little more noise than he would have allowed under normal circumstances, considering his parents were still home.

He allowed himself to float on the presence of Blaine, left conversation to touches and licks and bites rather than anything else. Because Blaine could understand that language as well as spoken word, because Blaine was somehow understanding of Kurt as a whole, because Blaine was his shelter.


End file.
